RAYR the wine shop is located on scenic Rockport Harbor in Rockport, Maine. We carry a selection of fine wines, from everyday to special occasions, a small selection of hand-crafted beers, as well as specialty food items from around the world.

Our inventory is carefully selected and constantly evolving in which we actively find, purchase, and sell high quality wines, grown in harmony with the Earth. Seeing Maine as a true representation of “the way life should be”, with its many small farms and farmers, we feel it necessary to help foster the growth of organic wine making. With over 65,000 wineries worldwide, we have found many small family owned and run farms, and have had tremendous success in finding sustainably grown, organic wines.

"Wine to us is like art. Each wine is a very unique expression of geographic location, soil type, grape varietal and wine making techniques. To put it bluntly, we love wine and its amazing expression of the grape."

Our Story

RAYR, pronounced like “rare”, unofficially opened the day before Thanksgiving in 2007. With a power outage the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the “official” Wednesday opening was impossible. Boxes of wine were everywhere. Wine bottles lined the counter. The beam and posts were unfinished and the store was a huge mess. The power outage ended the arduous task of checking in wines. So, without any electricity on Tuesday evening, two days before Thanksgiving, staring into the dark, we pulled a bottle of wine out of one of the numerous boxes sitting on the floor, went to the sofa in front of the wood stove and gave it a rest.

The power came back on at 10:30 the next morning and we resumed data entry and stocking. At around noon, seeing lights on in the shop, a truck pulled into the parking lot and a guy came to the door and knocked. He asked through the closed door, “Are you open”? And with that, we opened the doors, in spite of the mess, let the man in and within 15 minutes the parking lot was full of cars. A steady stream of customers came through the doors until about 8:00 that night. It was exciting. Despite being unable to process credit cards, aisles full of boxes, and a counter strewn with wine bottles, RAYR was open for business.

We closed shop the evening before Thanksgiving 2007 at 8:30, continued to check wines into the system until 4:00 am and reopened “officially” Friday, November 23rd, 2007. Since that time, RAYR has grown and changed, tripling the number of wines we carry to over 625 wines to date. RAYR has added organic and Non-GMO specialty food items from around the world and we strive to be an ongoing, contributing entity in the village of Rockport, Maine. Truly, Maine is "the way life should be", and we love it here.